About

This is part of the klapt.net Internet presence by Kristina Lauche and Peter Troxler.
klapt is nothing indecent or anything ...
and klapt.net is not some bavarian slang that would mean: "this does not work".
It's just our initials and an and in between ... enjoy the site!

For years ‘innovation vouchers’ have been one of the Dutch government’s ways to fund ‘knowledge institutions’. Whoever had a brilliant idea could apply for a voucher that then could be exchanged against a few hours of officially accredited knowledge work by e.g. PhD students as long as the Uni got the dough. No more! said Dutch minister Maxime Verhagen (CDA) on 22 November. As of 2011, innovation is vouched no more in .NL-land — and gone are ingeniously engineered schemes like this one…

And it took the office in charge over a month to inform interested parties about the decision … “agentschap.nl” sent an email on 29 December last year.

Want to buy a train ticket in Switzerland? Yeah, that’s possible … but hang on: don’t try to buy it in advance … the Swiss railways (SBB) have decided, that their customers are too likely to change their mind if travel is more than 30 days in the future. So you can’t buy a ticket for a journey more than 30 days away.

This is certainly straight stupid.

Interesting is the reason they give: “Da OnlineTickets nicht erstattet werden können, haben wir die Vorverkaufsfrist auf 30 Tage beschränkt. Denn je näher der Reisetag rückt, desto höher ist die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass Sie die Fahrt auch wirklich antreten können.” — “Since online tickets cannot be refunded, we have reduced the sales period to 30 days before travel. Since the closer your day of travel, the higher the probability that you actually will be able to travel.”

This is a textbook example of bad service design (no refunds). Even worse: the service provider officially declares the customer the stupid party and makes the service even worse. The stupid one in this case is, once more the service provider, in this case the Swiss railways — and probably the Swiss in general who seem to be happy with this nanny treatment.

Public transport on Google Maps (Google Transit) … is available in Poland, Romania, Tunisia, even Italy, Spain, Portugal, the UK and Belgium — no surprise that Germany, Switzerland, France are covered.

But the Netherlands? A blank spot …

from Google Transit at http://maps.google.com/intl/en/landing/transit/#mdy

Aberdeen City Council sold its city centre to the oh so generous interests of Oil-rich “Sir” Ian Wood yesterday. Councillors agreed to spend £140m (of which Ian pays £50m, the remaining deficit has aptly been labelled as “business opportunity”) … on ebay

As airlines start bullying airtraffic controllers, eurocontrol becomes defiant on twitter: “For clarification: we do not take decisions as to whether to open/close airspace. Decision made by national authorities in each country” and “We’re responsible for ensuring that all involved, including airlines and ANSPs are then aware of decisions made by national authorities”.

This is the current forecast for the ash cloud for 06:00 UTC on April 18th — the red curve shows the size of the cloud at flight level 100 (FL100, the pressure altitude in units of 100 feet). This means this is essentially a “no-fly-zone” for any height below approximately 3000 meters.

And below is an excerpt of the official air space closures “VOLCANIC ASH – UPDATED AT 1600 UTC” collated by Eurocontrol — compare the “closed until” times with the forecast in the map. I am surprised how authorities create a climate of hope with these closure times (e.g. Netherlands: 18th, 0000 UTC) when it is obvious from the forecast, that the closure will be extended by probably another 12 to 24 hours. This is not only angering passengers, but aircraft operators as well.

Airspaces zero-rated/closed until:
(Aerodromes geographically located within these airspaces will be unavailable):